Living in the Milky Way

Anke Domaske is a fashion designer from Germany. You may not see her creations on the front cover of a glossy mag or being strutted down the runway in Milan, but she has won an award. Pretty impressive!

Anke is the designer of an award-winning new textile made entirely from milk that’s environmentally friendly as well as soothing to people with skin allergies.

The biochemist, who doubles up as a fashion designer developed ‘Qmilch’ – a combination of quality and the German word for milk.

Natural resources such as water are used in the thousands of litres to produce just a bolt of cotton. Cotton also takes up a lot of land and chemicals, which are limited, which is why there are such high hopes for ‘Qmilch’ as being a sustainable fibre.

Anke was inspired to come up a new fabric after seeing people close to her suffering from skin irritations. She and her team of six landed on a process of reducing milk to a protein powder that is then boiled and pressed into strands that can be woven into a fabric.

This fabric needs only 2L of water is needed to produce 1kg of fabric, or enough to make several standard dresses. By comparison, the same amount of cotton requires more than 10 000L of water.

Do you think the cotton made from milk has the potential to become a sustainable fibre? Let us know!